During a meeting in Astana, the Ministers of Transport of Kazakhstan and China, Marat Karabayev and Liu Wei, discussed the creation of a multimodal transport corridor for the transportation of goods, including from Russia, along the Irtysh River, the Ministry of Transport of Kazakhstan reported.
As noted in the statement of the department, the topics of the meeting also included the use of the cargo delivery route along the Ili River, which flows through the Almaty region of Kazakhstan and the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, as well as other ways to increase cargo turnover between the two countries.
„Based on the results of the first quarter of 2025, the volume of export-import road transport with China increased by 82%, reaching 822 thousand tons of cargo. According to the results of the first four months of this year, the volume of rail freight traffic with China amounted to 11.4 million tons, an increase of 13%,“ the report said.
The head of the Chinese Ministry of Transport arrived in Kazakhstan to participate in the first Astana-Beijing transport forum. It is attended by more than 300 representatives of the business community and transport and logistics companies from both countries. The forum will include B2B and G2B meetings. “This forum is expected to become an annual event“, the Ministry of Transport noted.
Last November, the head of Rosmorrechflot Andrei Tarasenko announcedthat the agency is considering the possibility of delivering cargo to China and Turkey via the Irtysh, which was actively used for cargo transportation in Soviet times. In December 2024 the head of the Ministry of Transport of Kazakhstan Karabayev noted that the potential for freight transport along the Irtysh River is estimated at 2.5 million tons per year.